He was quite dead.  The charge, a bullet, had passed in just above the region of the heart, killing him instantly.  I searched him, but found only a knife, a little money, and some tobacco; nothing which could identify him.  He was well-made, middle-aged, and of a thoroughly vile and repulsive countenance.

The necessary legal formalities were gone through as quickly and quietly as possible, and the entrances by which the burglars had come in well secured.  They had evidently reconnoitred within and without the building during the day, and selected a back way into the cellar, through which they found no trouble in ascending to the Library.

Some days afterwards, I bethought me to examine the old musket.  It was a heavy, old-fashioned “queen’s arm,” with no unusual marks, as I thought; but upon a silver plate, let into the hollow of the butt, I found, coarsely and strongly engraved, “JOAB BRYCE, 1765.”

Upon mentioning this circumstance to our Recording Secretary, and wondering how the gun came to be loaded, he told me that the fault was his.  The weapon, he said, had been deposited in the Library by a son of the old revolutionary soldier; and he added, that this son had informed him that the old man, who seems to have inherited something of the peculiar traits of his ancient race, having had this charge in his gun at the conclusion of the siege of Yorktown, where he was present with a New England regiment, had managed afterwards to avoid discharging or drawing it, and had left it by will to his eldest son to be kept loaded as it was; with the strange clause, that the charge “might sarve out a Beardsley, if it couldn’t a Britisher.”

The depositor, the Secretary further told me, had religiously kept the old gun, and, with a curious, simple strictness of adherence to the spirit of his father’s directions, had oiled the lock, picked the flint, wired the touch-hole, and put in fresh priming, when he brought the weapon to the Library.

“I meant to have unloaded it, of course,” pursued the excellent Secretary, “but it passed out of my mind.”

A week or two afterwards, I found in one of those obscure columns of “minion solid,” in which the great New York papers embalm the memory of their current metropolitan crime, the following notice:—­

“We are informed that the burglar lately killed in an attempt to rob the ——­ Historical Library has been found to be the notorious cracksman, ‘Bill Young’; but that his real name was Isaac Beardsley.”

* * * * *

DAYLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.

  In broad daylight, and at noon,
  Yesterday I saw the moon
  Sailing high, but faint and white,
  As a school-boy’s paper kite.

  In broad daylight, yesterday,
  I read a poet’s mystic lay;
  And it seemed to me at most
  As a phantom, or a ghost.

  But at length the feverish day
  Like a passion died away,
  And the night, serene and still,
  Fell on village, vale, and hill.